Co-authors: Marc Hedlund, SVP, ProductDevelopment at Etsy. Twitter and Etsy are working together on a new project to help our engineers learn from each others’ practices, with the idea of making both of our engineering teams better as a result. Likewise, a Twitter Platform Engineer is traveling to Brooklyn for the week, and watching what Etsy does well and poorly, all while helping out (and, of course, deploying on her first day ). MORE

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from ProductDevelopment to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The ProductDevelopment Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries. At first glance, the diagram, which illustrates the process of getting a new product into the hands of waiting customers, appears helpful and benign. MORE

This post is brought to you by Jama Software – reinventing product delivery by changing how products are conceived, built and launched. When you’re managing productdevelopment for large, complex organizations, employee engagement can be a major challenge. MORE

A fellow product manager that’s working on a new product idea recently wrote to me: “Common feedback I receive from our our engineers and executives is they don’t have a good grasp of the product vision. The post No, I Can’t Give You A Roadmap For Our New Product (Yet) appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager. MORE

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the productdevelopment model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. Every startup has some methodology for productdevelopment, launch and life-cycle management. Yet at the end of the day even with all these processes 9 out of 10 of new products are failures. MORE

Through case studies, LTV explores productdevelopment, marketing and business development challenges that confront entrepreneurs as they launch info tech ventures. Is the “product-market fit concept useful for entrepreneurs and managers? MORE

A fellow product manager that’s working on a new product idea recently wrote to me: “Common feedback I receive from our our engineers and executives is they don’t have a good grasp of the product vision. But where are we going with this if we find the hypothesis to … Continue reading No, I Can’t Give You A Roadmap For Our New Product (Yet). MORE

By Aileen Wu Success productdevelopment requires not only blood, sweat and tears, but also a dialogue among colleagues from several different disciplines. Designers, who invent the look and feel of products, are sometimes fundamentally motivated to push the envelope of convention. Engineers, who build the products and test their integrity, can sometimes be skeptical of the motives and value that business people bring to the table. MORE

This is the fifth post in my Product Planning Series. My approach to productdevelopment revolves around user-centered design. The basic tenet of this philosophy is that the product team must be equipped with a thorough understanding of the end user’s needs, wants, expectations and limitations in order to create an excellent product solution to solve the user’s problems. MORE

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in productdevelopment is, “good enough never is. And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Minimum viable products are not a single hypothesis. MORE

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for productdevelopment activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. MORE

It may not turn companies into lean, mean startup machines of innovation, but it may help with two major pitfalls that plague most new product initiatives. . The first is the lack of custom input early on in the productdevelopment cycle. MORE

This is the fourth post in my Product Planning Series. Any new product or service development program is a massively interdisciplinary exercise. On the customer research / persona development side: Product discovery research done – target persona(s) chosen and fleshed out. Where applicable, develop ROI analysis for target customers (this will be used by product marketing to convince prospective customers to adopt the product or service). MORE

Products are built, released, iterated upon based on customer feedback, and the cycle is repeated. The idea is that, rather than specializing, employees at start-ups are given the latitude to engage in a diverse range of activities, all of which contribute to productdevelopment. MORE

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. development costs new venture research valley of death MORE

As revenue began to roll into Red Hat, a race began among startups to develop an open source offering for each proprietary software counterpart and then wrap a Red Hat-style service offering around it. Product roadmaps and requirements are often left to a distributed group of developers. MORE

But one crucial one that you can implement might be called the “Rhythm Method”: imparting a well-known beat to your product and service upgrades. Obviously, a frantic reaction to someone else’s move will damage the way your biz dev, sales, product managers, engineers, PR people, and strategy teams interrelate. Industry Experts execution iterating productdevelopment startups Steve Jobs tactics venture capital MORE

of its product in Q2 of this year. However, after the new VP of Engineering looks into the schedule and deliverables, he informs you that the product will be delayed, possibly by six to nine months, due to stability and feature completeness. features will result in an uncompetitive product and releasing “a piece of crap” will undermine the credibility of the company. Prior to now, everyone agreed that product management is responsible for release decisions. MORE

This is the sixth post in my Product Planning Series. It conjures up the bad old days where folks spend months developing an MRD, PRD and a Functional Specification. For example, if you are developing a medical device that needs to go through the 5(10)k process, you really have very little choice. Good team communications practice begats good project execution, which will increase the probability that your product will do what you want it to do in the marketplace. MORE

Sunday, March 6, 2011 Lean Logic Extends To All Functions, Not Just ProductDevelopment by Private Our class discussion around Foursquare highlighted a strange paradox that I’ve been trying to articulate for a while now. Isn't a 'Minimal Viable Product' Kinda Lame? MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific productdevelopment. By embracing a scientific approach to productdevelopment, not only will your business have a much higher probability of success, but it will also be a more fun and creative place to work. By starting a new product off with as few features as possible (1?), MORE

They make high quality stuff and they guarantee on if you go to their website and read their product guarantee. Even if people ask for the features we are not gonna build them and there’re odd even for against this but for me it always struck me as kind of an egotistical experience because you are not buying your product, other people are buying your product, other people are giving you money for the use of your product that you are building for them. MORE

The center will serve as the company’s outpost for its digital teams with a focus on engineering and productdevelopment for Condé Nast’s digital portfolio. Condé Nast, the publisher of Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, Monday announced plans to open a new digital innovation center in Austin with 50 employees. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their productdevelopment process. When a process is not working, theres usually somebody who feels the pain most acutely, and in that company it was the product manager. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced. MORE

Not only some of the smartest advice anyone has given about how to approach software development, there is also a trick that is guaranteed to make you feel more confident, more powerful and more in control of what you do. So everyone starts out with this some variation of this: we want our product to be desirable. Because the world is full of “Great product; didn’t sell.” And this is true even for companies where the product actually costs a lot of money. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Productdevelopment leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in productdevelopment. Its a force that allows startups to build products at parity with much larger companies - cheaper and much faster. In the end, I believe they co-created our product with us. MORE

The same rule applies to product and app development. Launching a new product can be costly, but adding features to a successful existing product can be even more costly if the additions take away from your product’s unique focus. MORE

You pimp product specs (ugh!). When someone clicks on the product reviews tab, that is a micro-conversion. I've developed distaste for the time on site metric. You feel proud because you started with just 5% of the traffic from search engines. Yes, data is important. MORE

Guest post by Lisa Regan On August 20, Eric will sit down with developer and Hut8Labs co-founder Dan Milstein for a webcast you can join to discuss “Getting Engineers Into the Lean Startup Cycle.” This conversation will be a great opportunity for engineers and engineering managers to learn more about implementing Lean Startup ideas. It’s also for founders who want to think about how engineering and the rest of the business team can realign around a shared set of goals. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer DevelopmentEngineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. MORE

On November 14 (that’s this Thursday) at 1p PT, Eric Ries will speak with Kent Beck, a creator of Agile software development, about facilitating the work of engineers and product teams. This Thursday’s webcast will get to the heart of how product groups work—and how they can work better. But it’s not easy to implement this kind of approach, and product groups using fast iteration will need different structures and practices than those working in long-release cycles. MORE

HOME About the Femgineer Speaking Engagements Reading List Recruiting Startup Engineers With the startup market taking off, there is always a clamor to find good engineers, developers, and designers. Engineers love to build, solve tough problems, and make progress. MORE

Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Ian Langworth started his career as an O’Reilly author and software engineer at Google. MORE

This is especially interesting to me because some 15 years ago, while I was with a product design consultancy, I was part of a team that worked on an “infotainment car” concept with a cutting edge automobile company that shall remain nameless. Here is proof that an idea alone isn’t enough to make a successful product or business. Customer research EngineeringProductDevelopmentProduct Management startup connected car infotainment MORE

Thursday, May 5, 2011 Yogi ProductDevelopment by Justin Hakuta For my final project I worked on developing a prototype for an online yoga community I’m launching. Here are some lessons I learned along the way: Developing a prototype See the future, act in the present. MORE

Proctor & Gamble, the $185 billion market-cap consumer products juggernaut, has a tried and true method for developing new products: extensive consumer research, including surveys and focus groups, product testing, name testing, ad/slogan/copy testing, iterate product design, line up manufacturing capacity and then, finally, concluding with in-store merchandising, final branding and ad buys for launch. So why do thousands of people help Quirky make products? MORE

Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. ” “Don’t be a “me too” product!” “Don’t be a me-too product” This has become a mantra. “Me-too” products are just fine. In fact, starting with a “me-too” product as your first product – is the preferable way to go. This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev. MORE

As seasoned engineers and executives know, developing a technology product doesnt begin and end with the product team. Creating a website, app, hardware or software product involves an intensive effort on the part of multiple departments within an organization, with the project manager or team at the helm. Theres nothing wrong with aiming high in productdevelopment, providing that youre honest about what is possible. MORE

Anyone here running a business, starting a business, creating products? This is something we all share, we all want to create great products, and one of the first products I worked on was back in the 1980s, I worked for IBM for ten years, and I worked on a product called the PC Junior. Anyone familiar with that product? We just came out with this product yesterday and they are already calling it a flop, and unfortunately they were right. MORE

In this guest post Ameet shares with us his story of how he turned his first product based company to a wild success based on what he learned from Business of Software 2011. But it always frustrated me to have exciting software ideas, but not have the software development knowledge to implement them myself… especially as I saw plenty of other people moving ahead with them. It seemed like I was the only person there without a product of their own. MORE

Why CEOs Shouldn’t Mess with Engineers. The sad story of its sinking seems to have several potential causes, but one is noteworthy both in terms of engineering and leadership. Likely cause #1: after the ship was designed and construction was under way, the King overruled the engineers and added much heavier cannons on the upper armament deck. Tags: Business Leadership Technology engineers QA Stockholm Sweden Vasa Royal Warship MORE

While there is a great deal of excitement generated by new consumer products – smart glasses, activity trackers, smart watches, arm bands and companies that make them – jawbone, google, square, leap motion, etc, entrepreneurs and investors still are shy of venturing into the space. MORE

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. development costs new venture research valley of death

On November 14 (that’s this Thursday) at 1p PT, Eric Ries will speak with Kent Beck, a creator of Agile software development, about facilitating the work of engineers and product teams. This Thursday’s webcast will get to the heart of how product groups work—and how they can work better. But it’s not easy to implement this kind of approach, and product groups using fast iteration will need different structures and practices than those working in long-release cycles.

This post is brought to you by Jama Software – reinventing product delivery by changing how products are conceived, built and launched. When you’re managing productdevelopment for large, complex organizations, employee engagement can be a major challenge.

Not only some of the smartest advice anyone has given about how to approach software development, there is also a trick that is guaranteed to make you feel more confident, more powerful and more in control of what you do. So everyone starts out with this some variation of this: we want our product to be desirable. Because the world is full of “Great product; didn’t sell.” And this is true even for companies where the product actually costs a lot of money.

A fellow product manager that’s working on a new product idea recently wrote to me: “Common feedback I receive from our our engineers and executives is they don’t have a good grasp of the product vision. The post No, I Can’t Give You A Roadmap For Our New Product (Yet) appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager.

Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Ian Langworth started his career as an O’Reilly author and software engineer at Google.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their productdevelopment process. When a process is not working, theres usually somebody who feels the pain most acutely, and in that company it was the product manager. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

While there is a great deal of excitement generated by new consumer products – smart glasses, activity trackers, smart watches, arm bands and companies that make them – jawbone, google, square, leap motion, etc, entrepreneurs and investors still are shy of venturing into the space.

Guest post by Lisa Regan On August 20, Eric will sit down with developer and Hut8Labs co-founder Dan Milstein for a webcast you can join to discuss “Getting Engineers Into the Lean Startup Cycle.” This conversation will be a great opportunity for engineers and engineering managers to learn more about implementing Lean Startup ideas. It’s also for founders who want to think about how engineering and the rest of the business team can realign around a shared set of goals.

Co-authors: Marc Hedlund, SVP, ProductDevelopment at Etsy. Twitter and Etsy are working together on a new project to help our engineers learn from each others’ practices, with the idea of making both of our engineering teams better as a result. Likewise, a Twitter Platform Engineer is traveling to Brooklyn for the week, and watching what Etsy does well and poorly, all while helping out (and, of course, deploying on her first day ).

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Productdevelopment leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in productdevelopment. Its a force that allows startups to build products at parity with much larger companies - cheaper and much faster. In the end, I believe they co-created our product with us.

As revenue began to roll into Red Hat, a race began among startups to develop an open source offering for each proprietary software counterpart and then wrap a Red Hat-style service offering around it. Product roadmaps and requirements are often left to a distributed group of developers.

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in productdevelopment is, “good enough never is. And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Minimum viable products are not a single hypothesis.

A fellow product manager that’s working on a new product idea recently wrote to me: “Common feedback I receive from our our engineers and executives is they don’t have a good grasp of the product vision. The post No, I Can’t Give You A Roadmap For Our New Product (Yet) appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager.

Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Ian Langworth started his career as an O’Reilly author and software engineer at Google.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their productdevelopment process. When a process is not working, theres usually somebody who feels the pain most acutely, and in that company it was the product manager. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

Why CEOs Shouldn’t Mess with Engineers. The sad story of its sinking seems to have several potential causes, but one is noteworthy both in terms of engineering and leadership. Likely cause #1: after the ship was designed and construction was under way, the King overruled the engineers and added much heavier cannons on the upper armament deck. Tags: Business Leadership Technology engineers QA Stockholm Sweden Vasa Royal Warship

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from ProductDevelopment to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The ProductDevelopment Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries. At first glance, the diagram, which illustrates the process of getting a new product into the hands of waiting customers, appears helpful and benign.

They make high quality stuff and they guarantee on if you go to their website and read their product guarantee. Even if people ask for the features we are not gonna build them and there’re odd even for against this but for me it always struck me as kind of an egotistical experience because you are not buying your product, other people are buying your product, other people are giving you money for the use of your product that you are building for them.

Proctor & Gamble, the $185 billion market-cap consumer products juggernaut, has a tried and true method for developing new products: extensive consumer research, including surveys and focus groups, product testing, name testing, ad/slogan/copy testing, iterate product design, line up manufacturing capacity and then, finally, concluding with in-store merchandising, final branding and ad buys for launch. So why do thousands of people help Quirky make products?

This is the sixth post in my Product Planning Series. It conjures up the bad old days where folks spend months developing an MRD, PRD and a Functional Specification. For example, if you are developing a medical device that needs to go through the 5(10)k process, you really have very little choice. Good team communications practice begats good project execution, which will increase the probability that your product will do what you want it to do in the marketplace.

Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. ” “Don’t be a “me too” product!” “Don’t be a me-too product” This has become a mantra. “Me-too” products are just fine. In fact, starting with a “me-too” product as your first product – is the preferable way to go. This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev.

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the productdevelopment model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. Every startup has some methodology for productdevelopment, launch and life-cycle management. Yet at the end of the day even with all these processes 9 out of 10 of new products are failures.

The same rule applies to product and app development. Launching a new product can be costly, but adding features to a successful existing product can be even more costly if the additions take away from your product’s unique focus.

In this guest post Ameet shares with us his story of how he turned his first product based company to a wild success based on what he learned from Business of Software 2011. But it always frustrated me to have exciting software ideas, but not have the software development knowledge to implement them myself… especially as I saw plenty of other people moving ahead with them. It seemed like I was the only person there without a product of their own.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer DevelopmentEngineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific productdevelopment. By embracing a scientific approach to productdevelopment, not only will your business have a much higher probability of success, but it will also be a more fun and creative place to work. By starting a new product off with as few features as possible (1?),

A fellow product manager that’s working on a new product idea recently wrote to me: “Common feedback I receive from our our engineers and executives is they don’t have a good grasp of the product vision. But where are we going with this if we find the hypothesis to … Continue reading No, I Can’t Give You A Roadmap For Our New Product (Yet).

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for productdevelopment activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

As seasoned engineers and executives know, developing a technology product doesnt begin and end with the product team. Creating a website, app, hardware or software product involves an intensive effort on the part of multiple departments within an organization, with the project manager or team at the helm. Theres nothing wrong with aiming high in productdevelopment, providing that youre honest about what is possible.

This is the fifth post in my Product Planning Series. My approach to productdevelopment revolves around user-centered design. The basic tenet of this philosophy is that the product team must be equipped with a thorough understanding of the end user’s needs, wants, expectations and limitations in order to create an excellent product solution to solve the user’s problems.

of its product in Q2 of this year. However, after the new VP of Engineering looks into the schedule and deliverables, he informs you that the product will be delayed, possibly by six to nine months, due to stability and feature completeness. features will result in an uncompetitive product and releasing “a piece of crap” will undermine the credibility of the company. Prior to now, everyone agreed that product management is responsible for release decisions.

This is especially interesting to me because some 15 years ago, while I was with a product design consultancy, I was part of a team that worked on an “infotainment car” concept with a cutting edge automobile company that shall remain nameless. Here is proof that an idea alone isn’t enough to make a successful product or business. Customer research EngineeringProductDevelopmentProduct Management startup connected car infotainment

Anyone here running a business, starting a business, creating products? This is something we all share, we all want to create great products, and one of the first products I worked on was back in the 1980s, I worked for IBM for ten years, and I worked on a product called the PC Junior. Anyone familiar with that product? We just came out with this product yesterday and they are already calling it a flop, and unfortunately they were right.

HOME About the Femgineer Speaking Engagements Reading List Recruiting Startup Engineers With the startup market taking off, there is always a clamor to find good engineers, developers, and designers. Engineers love to build, solve tough problems, and make progress.

You pimp product specs (ugh!). When someone clicks on the product reviews tab, that is a micro-conversion. I've developed distaste for the time on site metric. You feel proud because you started with just 5% of the traffic from search engines. Yes, data is important.

Through case studies, LTV explores productdevelopment, marketing and business development challenges that confront entrepreneurs as they launch info tech ventures. Is the “product-market fit concept useful for entrepreneurs and managers?

By Aileen Wu Success productdevelopment requires not only blood, sweat and tears, but also a dialogue among colleagues from several different disciplines. Designers, who invent the look and feel of products, are sometimes fundamentally motivated to push the envelope of convention. Engineers, who build the products and test their integrity, can sometimes be skeptical of the motives and value that business people bring to the table.

Thursday, May 5, 2011 Yogi ProductDevelopment by Justin Hakuta For my final project I worked on developing a prototype for an online yoga community I’m launching. Here are some lessons I learned along the way: Developing a prototype See the future, act in the present.

The center will serve as the company’s outpost for its digital teams with a focus on engineering and productdevelopment for Condé Nast’s digital portfolio. Condé Nast, the publisher of Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, Monday announced plans to open a new digital innovation center in Austin with 50 employees.

It may not turn companies into lean, mean startup machines of innovation, but it may help with two major pitfalls that plague most new product initiatives. . The first is the lack of custom input early on in the productdevelopment cycle.

Products are built, released, iterated upon based on customer feedback, and the cycle is repeated. The idea is that, rather than specializing, employees at start-ups are given the latitude to engage in a diverse range of activities, all of which contribute to productdevelopment.

Sunday, March 6, 2011 Lean Logic Extends To All Functions, Not Just ProductDevelopment by Private Our class discussion around Foursquare highlighted a strange paradox that I’ve been trying to articulate for a while now. Isn't a 'Minimal Viable Product' Kinda Lame?

This is the fourth post in my Product Planning Series. Any new product or service development program is a massively interdisciplinary exercise. On the customer research / persona development side: Product discovery research done – target persona(s) chosen and fleshed out. Where applicable, develop ROI analysis for target customers (this will be used by product marketing to convince prospective customers to adopt the product or service).